What Have They Done to Bobby?

For years now, Emilio Estevez (!) has been trying to get his script about the sixteen hours before RFK's assassination made.

For years now, Emilio Estevez (!) has been trying to get his script about the sixteen hours before RFK's assassination made. Now, with the help of Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Ashton Kutcher, an unknown production company, and a mysterious European industrialist, Bobby is done. This is a story of determination, career redemption, selflessness, and how not to make a movie.

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So, a little speculation here. You're Emilio Estevez.You're sitting around your joint, late nineties, drinking a cold one, staring at yourself in one of those floor-to-ceiling mirrors that were so popular back in the eighties. When you were popular. And you're looking at your best days fading into the past. Days of big-time roles in movies like The Outsiders, St. Elmo's Fire. Days of slipping it to the likes of Demi Moore. You're also watching your next-best days do a fade. Days of roles in programmers like Another Stakeout, Young Guns II.Mighty Ducks ad infinitum. Days of slipping it to the likes of Paula Abdul. You've still got your boyish good looks, but boyish good looks have a way of looking freakish on a guy approaching forty.

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But, dammit, you're Emilio Estevez! None of those complex, misunderstood youths you used to play back in your heyday would just let life slip away. And neither will you! Plus, you don't have to, 'cause your family's connected up the wazoo in Tinseltown. So you make some phone calls, cash in some chits, get some big-name friends to help out, and make yourself the most star-studded movie since Irwin Allen ran out of disasters to film!

It's 1999. People are laughing at the thought of G. W. Bush taking a run at the White House, Ricky Martin owns the airwaves, and serendipity's in effect! Emilio Estevez was doing a publicity shoot for a cable movie he directed called Rated X at Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel. Back in the day, the Ambassador, sporting the Cocoanut Grove nightclub and Hollywood clientele, was, like, the West Coast resort destination. Then Bobby Kennedy got assassinated there and the joint did a slow decline until it was entirely shuttered and used infrequently for feature filming. And publicity shoots for cable movies. So, Emilio's getting some pics taken at the Ambassador. No big deal. But that exact same night, Emilio is at a film screening where he runs into Bobby Shriver--Bobby K.'s nephew.

It was like the ghost of Bobby Kennedy was screaming: Write about me! Oliver Stone did a movie about Jack! What about me? And a script was begun.

The signs might've been clear and the connections to the Kennedys deep--Emilio's dad had once portrayed Bobby in a film and was a family friend of the Kennedys--but coming up with a fresh angle on Camelot was daunting. Despite his best efforts, E. E. couldn't get past page 30 of his script for more than a year.

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So E. E. decided he needed to get in touch with the pure artist inside of him. Clear his head. Take a ride, maybe. Let inspiration be his sat-nav system. So he hopped his hoopty up the California coast to Pismo Beach, where he got a spot at a cut-rate motel, 'cause that's what artists do to get their muse on.

And you know who was working at that motel? Fate. Fate was working there. Fate and a lady named Diane. As Emilio tells the story, he was talking up this Diane about his unfinished script on Bobby, and, lo and behold, Diane had been a Kennedy volunteer at the Ambassador that fateful June night in 1968. Emilio told The New York Times (he would not comment for Esquire) that Diane's story "became the bleeding heart through which all the blood flowed to this piece." And I think we all know everyone in Hollywood loves a bleeding heart.

So, E. E.'d been smacked by his muse.

And he goes off and writes this deep, rich, moving, heartfelt tribute to a moment when innocence was again lost in America and . . .

And nobody cared. Nobody in Hollywood cared. For five years, nobody much gave an f about the script Emilio was now calling Bobby. Nobody wanted to put money into it, produce it, or generally be caught in public with it. But lemme be real, real clear about something: The fact that nobody in Hollywood cared about Emilio's script isn't a refiection on the quality of the material. Necessarily. Hollywood is like that. All Hollywood cares about is hot. What's hot, what's hip, and what's cool to kids fifteen to twenty-five.

And Coach Gordon Bombay ain't cool to kids fifteen to twenty-five.

So Emilio could've shown up carrying the Ten Commandments and not been able to get a meeting.

And on top of everything else, fate hit Emilio up again, but this time it hit him up to the negative. According to E. E., first the movie got caught up in the 9/11 wake, which caused Hollywood to go cold on making "serious" films. (Damn those terrorists.) Then some production company picked up the pic but went belly-up before shooting could start. (Damn those production companies without a secure line of credit.)

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At that point, most faded Hollywood types would have just quit. But to his credit, E. E.'s hardier than that. Took the time to get some skills directing episodes of TV procedurals du jour like Cold Case and CSI: NY. All the while, he kept hope alive that Bobby, at least the script, would live again.

Enter the Litvak. Along comes this cat Michel Litvak who's a Belgian industrialist backing an outfit called Bold Films, an L. A.--based production company. Now, Litvak's a mysterious sort. He's referred to on the Bold Films Web site as merely being an "international mogul," which sounds like the daytime occupation of one of Batman's nemeses. Like a lot of guys who are already loaded, he wants to get into the grimy movie business. So he starts up Bold Films and lets a couple of old friends front it for him in Hollywood: company president Gary Michael Walters, an entertainment lawyer who's proudly listed on the Bold Web site as having been a Jeopardy! winner, and Ed Bass, who's a producer and not listed on the Bold Web site at all. The extent of Bass's producing experience is three Bold films, the most notable the Ashley Judd starer Come Early Morning. But it, like the other Bold films, has yet to find theatrical distribution. Also working with Walters and Bass is a producer named Holly Wiersma, who happens to be the wife of Hollywood agent Cassian Elwes. Elwes, whose brother is Cary (The Princess Bride, Saw) Elwes, once produced a film, Men at Work, written and directed by Emilio Estevez. The two have stayed tight, and Elwes knows Estevez could use a break, so C. E. goes home and pimps E. E.'s script to his wife, figuring that after a few misses, Bold Films could use some good material. So Wiersma does her duty, and Litvak, being the smart international mogul he is, sees commercial potential in hooking up with Emilio, primarily, he says, because Emilio's career is on the skids. "Why would somebody who's doing great go with us?" Litvak was quoted as saying in The New York Times. And as if to drive the point home, the Times dispensed with literary flair when it described the first two films E. E. wrote and directed--Wisdom and Men at Work--as fiat-out "duds." But never mind his accomplishments, Emilio's got aspirations. He's fond of quoting what he says is Francis Ford Coppola's mantra: There's one God in heaven; there's one God on the set. That's the director.

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Now, a guy's gotta be real secure about his meat to compare himself to the good Lord Almighty and the father of the Godfathers in the same breath. And self-confidence, even if it's slightly self-overconfidence, is damn near like an aphrodisiac for those on the fringes of the entertainment industry.

Litvak started sporting teak for Bobby.

And it sure didn't hurt any that right about this time, E. E. attached his ex Demi Moore to the project. And not just Demi, but Sir Tony Hopkins as well. He and Emilio have been friends at least as far back as when they worked on the film Freejack together. They probably bonded over trying to buy up and burn every single copy of that sucker.

With a couple of Hollywood namesand a writer-director who fit the money guy's criteria of "not doing great" to perfection, Litvak optioned the script, and Bold was ready to green-light the project in the $3 to $5 million range. A respectable budget for a small indie movie.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the art house. Bobby, this little project that for years nobody would cross the street to spit on, started to become more than just an indie flick. It got caught up in something like a perfect storm of filmmaking. Money made the project real. And an Oscar-winning talent like Sir Tony is what's known in Hollywood as an actor magnet, the kind of actor who attracts other performers to a film because of the cachet he brings to the project. Bobby is also a fairly diverse script featuring characters of ages ranging from twenties to sixties. Black, Latino, middle-aged female characters--basically a lot of groups that are generally underserved by studios. Which means opportunities for actors who don't often get shots at high-profile roles. And it's about the Kennedys. Whether E. E. had intended it that way or not, Bobby was as much an agent's checklist as it was a script.

And when the offers were made, the names came a-running. Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Helen Hunt, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Martin Sheen, Harry Belafonte. Ashton Kutcher's got a cameo. Rumor was Meryl Streep had a part. Jesus was gonna have a walk-on. It went from a movie to a movement. Everybody wanted in.

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And everyone felt good about it. Gary Michael Walters: "This was like a tsunami for us." Walters credits rival agencies for working together to make their actors' schedules accommodate the shooting schedule and for talking them into cutting their fees to help make the budget work. And whereas normally rival agents are about as cooperative as Israel and Hamas, all of a sudden it was as if they were working together on some humanitarian relief effort. Walters says, "The agents and managers . . . really liked and pushed for the project. We have talent from every agency in Hollywood."

With the 10-percenters throwing one another hugs and the actors working on the cheap, the whole production was like something between old-school Hollywood "let's put on a show" fraternalism and a Jerry Lewis telethon.

Ed Bass: "I think a lot of actors did it for Emilio. Everybody loves a comeback story."

And for one groovy minute, things in Hollywood were real MGM Technicolor beautiful.

But Bobby got to be one of those careful-what-you-wish-for kinda things real quick.

As the project took on stature, it had trouble supporting its own weight. Hairline cracks started to form around the personalities. Conflict started seeping out. One issue developing was Litvak's wife, Svetlana Metkina, an actress whose work is pretty much limited to films her husband's financed. And one by Roger Corman. During preproduction on the film, Litvak dropped a bit of a bombshell on Emilio: He wanted the missus in the movie. Writing a guy's wife or mistress or life partner into a Hollywood film is as common as prayer in church. But when the guy's wife is Russian, her English is only passable, and the film is a historical drama about the day Bobby K. was shot in Los Angeles . . .

While Emilio was dealing with the boss's wife, the producers had to deal with the film's ever-fattening budget. Doing a period piece, replicating the past on film, is never cheap. Wardrobe, cars, props--everything's gotta be era-specific. And big stars at cut rates are still a whole lot more expensive than no-names. They have needs--trailers, stylists. The film's budget started to creep, then jog, then fiat-out sprint from the $3 to $5 million range well past $7 million.

One of the issues was the ambition of the script itself. Emilio had originally put it together with the intention of doing a $20 million movie. With just a couple of pictures under its belt, Bold Films didn't have the game to handle what was rolling into a mini-major.

As Walters kept writing checks, what started giving him the shakes was the fact that despite all the high-voltage star power he was shelling out bucks for, Bold Films couldn't find a distributor for the movie--a company that'd buy the movie, pay for the publicity and advertising, and get it into your local multiplex. Now, it's not unusual for an indie to have trouble finding a home. Director John Singleton famously couldn't give away a little thing he produced called Hustle & Flow until it played at the Sundance Film Festival, where his $2 million film sold for a hefty $9 million. The difference here, though, is that while Hustle & Flow had Oscar-caliber performances, Bobby had actual Oscar winners and still couldn't find anyone who wanted it.

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And then there was the script. At more than 150 pages, it was 30 pages longer than most big-budget studio scripts. And for a movie called Bobby, there's precious little Bobby Kennedy in the film, except when he shows up at the end to take a bullet. (Oops, should've put SPOILER ALERT before that for all the twenty-somethings that're gonna rush out to catch the flick opening night.) Instead, the film focuses on the disparate lives of disparate people who move in and out of the Ambassador Hotel the day Kennedy was killed. They deal with a variety of personal issues, but, outside of the character modeled after the inspiration for the film, few are specific to 1968. One crew member who asked to remain anonymous called it "an episode of Love Boat '68."

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So the guys at Bold Films got the idea that they needed to make the script . . . uh, manageable? Reasonable? Shootable? Bold went to E. E. and was like, Hey, Emilio, we need you to work on the script a little.

And Emilio cut a few pages.

And Bold was like, Hmmm, this sucker's still real long. And not quite manageable.

And all of a sudden that big ol' love fest that had been going on turns into Altamont Speedway. When ego's involved and millions are on the line and artistic vision gets called into question, shanks get pulled real quick.

Now, between The New York Times and the Bush administration, we all know that truth is bullshit. It's impossible to say how the ultranegativity got started, who's at "fault." What's for sure is that some really bad, tainted, hepatitis-C blood started brewing between Emilio and Bold Films in general, and Emilio and Ed Bass very specifically. Basically, it shaped up like this: Emilio felt as if he had a script Bold had agreed to shoot when it optioned it, and Bass felt that as the guy producing the script, he had a right to changes. Or, to flip it, Estevez was unreasonably intractable and Bass was incapable of a sizable production.

So a little war got started over the script, with Bass getting more insistent about changes and E. E. using more gadget plays than the Pittsburgh Steelers to keep from altering word one of his baby. Reportedly, his tactics ran the gamut from straight out ignoring Bass's notes to putting on supreme displays of histrionics at the production offices, which included imitation nervous breakdowns and fake heart attacks. Which all sounds like a lot more effort than taking a pass on a script.

And Bass, never really having had experience working with guys faking heart attacks, just kind of let things spiral out of control.

From another staffer: "I don't know what was worse, Emilio's acting or that they [the producers] let him get away with it."

And Litvak, who wasn't in country, really didn't know what the hell was going on. He was focused on getting bigger scenes for his wife to be played opposite one of the A-list stars, which just caused the production more headaches 'cause none of the A-list stars particularly wanted to do a superfluous scene just to beef up the boss's wife's acting reel.

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Bass craftily kept all of this negativity--cost overruns, adverse reaction to the script from distributors, no new scenes for the missus--from Litvak so as to save face until he could find a way to get things back on track.

Desperate to save the show, Bass figured that if Bold Films couldn't work with E. E., it had to work around him. With about a month to go before shooting started, Bass reportedly looked to bring in a script doctor to get Bobby into shape.

In Hollywood, it ain't real queer for studios to hire a grip of writers to work over a script before it goes into production. But what makes Bold's move so ultra--West Hollywood queer is that you don't rewrite a script written by the director of an indie movie. You sure don't do it without the auteur's cooperation thirty days before shooting starts. Which is what Bass did.

No one connected with the picture is very straight about additional writing on the movie. Gary Michael Walters was adamant that there was a "longtime tightening of the script," but every word was basically Emilio's. A moment later, he acknowledged that legendary Nashville screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury was brought on to the project. "Joan did a very minor polish" on the script, backtracks Walters. "Really she was just a consultant for Emilio." Additionally, Walters concedes that novelist John Ridley, who's got a producer credit on the film, also did a "polish" on the material.

But no matter who wrote what, only days--days--before the movie was to start shooting, at least three distinct versions of the script were floating around the offices of Bold, which left staff and crew completely confused as to which script they were supposed to be prepping. And when Estevez found out he was being rewritten, things got seriously hectic. He was determined to get his movie made his way, and Bass was just as bent on getting a new script shot. Bass threatened not to let Emilio act in a part he'd written for himself, then to take Emilio off his own picture altogether. The threats didn't stop until Bass was promising to literally sue Emilio out of his house and onto the street.

And when things got really hot, E. E. hit back with the nuclear option. He's the one who'd brought Sir Tony to the party, and he'd be just as happy to give his girl an early ride home if he didn't get his way. Walk from the whole movie with his bud Hopkins in tow. The thought being that without Hannibal Lecter, the rest of the cast who came on board to work with him would walk as well.

But all this was like a two-man death match on hot railroad tracks. No matter who won, both were gonna die, because the film's start date was rushing up and the movie was nowhere near ready to roll. With less than a week to go before the first day of shooting, with no script and the massive cast still not locked in (Heather Graham, Christian Slater, and

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Larry Fishburne were among the last-minute adds), the producers decided to push the start of the film by one week. One week in production time is not a huge deal. You gotta burn some money, but burning money was something Bold Films was getting good at.

Bigger problem: juggling the schedules of the major stars. Hoping the new shoot dates would fit with their schedules. If there was just one conflict, it could throw the whole project into a scramble to start replacing actors.

And then there was the Hurricane Katrina of problems: The Ambassador Hotel (where, you know, the movie is set and key scenes were scheduled to be shot) was about to be torn down by the city of L. A., and the city of L. A. was not about to stop demolition for some indie movie.

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So, of course, that's when the chaos got jacked.

Word came back to Bold that one of the newer versions of the script was getting interest from a distributor.

Bass, thinking the distribution problem solved, sends Litvak the new script. The script features more of his wife. Litvak wants to go with the new script.

Emilio finds out.

Emilio is faking heart attacks left and right.

New problem. One Bold hadn't considered: how to approach the actors with the new script, since it's not the script they signed on to do. Potentially they could all cry foul and take their limos back to Malibu.

The clock is ticking and tocking.

The Ambassador's getting sent to hotel heaven.

Change of plans.

Bold decides to go with a slightly modified version of Emilio's script. Which they need to cobble together. Over a weekend.

And Bass decides not to tell Litvak he's not getting his new script. Which is always a good move--not telling your billionaire boss you're wasting his dough.

But Litvak, being an international mogul, ain't no dummy. He's wondering what in the f is going on with his loot, with his script, with his movie, with the part for the missus, and he hops a plane to the States.

Oh, shit. The boss is coming to town.

Sweat's rolling down Bass's forehead. His lungs are aching as he tries to suck the Hollywood air that's getting thinner by the second.

Emilio's doing a one-man show in the parking lot of the production offices, begging to be yanked from his own movie, most likely a shrewd sympathy move as much as a cry for a mercy killing.

That and he's putting up a four-corner stall until Litvak hits town.

Ticktock.

The wrecking ball is swinging.

Jet wheels are touching down.

The boss man arrives.

The truth gets found out. The production's out of control. Over budget. The script Litvak wanted hasn't been sent to the actors. . . .

Oh, and you know the hotel the whole movie takes place in? Funny thing about that . . .

So now, like any good Hollywood programmer, the story reaches a climax. After five years of struggle, was Litvak gonna throw more money at Emilio's floundering production, or was this Bobby star-crossed as well?

Litvak has a private sit-down with Emilio to talk about things. For Emilio, it's make-or-break time. Forget every other performance he's ever given. He wants his movie made, he's gotta channel some Larry Olivier with some Richard Burton on the side. Now, nobody's exactly sure what got said, if any coronary ailments got faked, but what's for sure: When the two men resurfaced, one thing had been decided--more scenes for the boss's wife!

And with that compromise, Bobby was a go picture.

Never underestimate an international mogul's love for his wife.

Emilio was no longer bottom bitch. It was gonna be his movie, his way. . . . Except for, you know, those new scenes.

And Ed Bass?

Emilio's parting salutation to Ed was "Checkmate, asshole!"

Officially, Bass is taking a leave of absence from Bold Films. It's a sabbatical Bass is pretty chill about. "You know, once the lights go on and the cameras start rolling, everyone else is just standing around anyway," he says.

Bobby got filmed as the Ambassador got torn down around it. In truth, with only a few scenes actually filmed at the hotel, the whole exercise was more vanity than actual necessity.

For a while, whether anybody would ever actually get to see the movie remained in question. Distributors were hardly beating a path to Bold's door for a piece of the action. "We're in no rush [to make a deal]," Walters said early this year. "We took the Field of Dreams approach. If you build it, they will come."

Walters's Zen may have paid off in the end, as the Weinstein Company picked up the film for distribution for an undisclosed amount. Undisclosed being the interesting point. In a town where people love to brag about every little thing and big-money sales are what make the headlines, nobody's crowing about what Bobby sold for.

Still, filming a movie about Bobby Kennedy's assassination even partly on historical grounds is an accomplishment, and if nothing else, Emilio Estevez is all about chalking accomplishments. He could be heard on the set saying of his movie, "For me, just writing the script is victory enough."

Let's hope there are at least a couple of bigger ups waiting for him. After surviving one of the wilder rides in recent indie history, you kinda feel the guy deserves more out of things than a little self-gratification.